The Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin-Xi Jinping Summit: A New Yalta?

National Interest | Tsiporah Fried

US President Donald Trump has signaled openness to a proposed trilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the November 2026 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Shenzhen. The gathering, initially proposed by Moscow, aims to focus on nuclear disarmament rather than the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This initiative follows Washington's suspension of key tariffs under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 on 16 October. New START expired in February 2026. This left the United States and Russia, who control 86 percent of global nuclear weapons, without a binding strategic arms control treaty alongside China's expanding arsenal. While direct great-power transactionality aims to bypass institutional inertia, practical execution risks eroding transatlantic alliance credibility and intelligence-sharing mechanisms. European partners fear their security architecture could become a bargaining variable in broad trilateral negotiations conducted without Ukrainian or allied participation.

Comment

Bypassing formal multilateral channels for direct trilateral bargaining fundamentally weakens the structural integrity of NATO's extended nuclear deterrence guarantees. When Washington negotiates strategic parameters without prior consultation through the Nuclear Planning Group, it disconnects strategic arms control from the operational realities of European collective defence. This decoupling signals to allies in Western Europe that sovereign security requirements are subordinate to great-power transactional arrangements.

The primary friction lies in the institutional mechanisms that operationalise transatlantic deterrence, specifically joint targeting protocols and dual-capable aircraft deployments under the United States European Command. Excluding European command structures from high-level nuclear negotiations undermines confidence in B61 nuclear gravity bomb sharing arrangements across host airbases like Buchel and Volkel. Consequently, these diplomatic omissions compel individual member states to reassess their reliance on the United States European Command while fragmenting NATO's integrated air and missile defence architecture.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If trilateral arms negotiations bypass the Nuclear Planning Group, will host nations sustaining B61 gravity bomb deployments maintain their operational commitments to NATO's nuclear sharing mission?

The available evidence points toward severe political strain on forward-deployed deterrence capabilities, as host nations like Germany and the Netherlands face heightened domestic pushback against housing American ordnance without consultation rights. However, the lack of an immediate, sovereign European nuclear alternative means states will likely preserve current infrastructure under the United States European Command while privately accelerating independent defence initiatives. My assessment is that formal withdrawal from nuclear sharing arrangements remains unlikely in the short term, but operational consensus surrounding these missions will steadily erode.

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